The Coldest Night Read Free

late, their little house in the city had taken on the austerity of a nunnery.
    “Something bad?” he said, but she had no more to say, and however discontent her sleep might be, each morning she inhabited her kitchen with a strange radiance and the next morning was no different.
    “You have always been such a good boy,” she said, thanking him for his care and tenderness. She was cooking his breakfast and packing their lunches and told him how much she loved him and wanted to know about his life.
    “There’s nothing to tell,” he said.
    “You have a sweetheart yet?”
    “No, nothing like that.”
    “You will,” she said, and told him someday he would leave her for someone else and when that happened it would be okay.
    “I worry about you,” he said.
    “It doesn’t happen all at once,” she said, and smiled. “You lose your mind in stages. I will be okay.”
    T HE RAIN WAS letting up. He drew deeply on his cigarette. He tried to make sense of the indecipherable. He did not know if he understood love. He knew he loved his mother and she loved him, but he did not understand if he could love someone else or not.
    Drops of water continued to fall from the eaves of the low-spreading roof. He fingered a frayed buttonhole as he stared off into the pines. He thought of his grandfather. Death was not difficult to understand. You were alive and then you were not.
    He felt the eyes of the Gaylen horse on his back. He finished his smoke and pinched it off. When he turned to her she nickered and stretched toward him. In the damp lightless barn he let her nuzzle his open coat until she found the licorice he carried. He lifted the flap on his breast pocket to reveal the sticks and the horse ate them as if eating from his chest. She blew gently and nosed his chest and then she let her chin rest on his shoulder.
    “Easy as pie,” he said, his face to her cheek, and told her it was time for him to get going.
    He pulled up his collar and stepped into the wet haze. He could see the lights in the city below and the lights on the river, sparkling like wire-strung jewels, the boats and barges and all the little boathouses. There was a flowery smell in the air, strange and sourceless, and from the stables the occasional tromp of slow bodies shifting hooves. He thought it would be a pretty night with the stars coming on.
    Somebody was calling his name. Walter helloed again, slammed the door to his truck and leaned against it.
    “What’s the good news?” Henry called out.
    “There’s a devil on my shoulder whispering in my ear.”
    “What’s he sayin’?”
    “Life’s a game and it’s rigged. What’s your story?”
    “I ain’t got one.”
    “Dirty weather,” Walter said grimly when Henry came up. “Ain’t good for bid’ness. Keeps the money away.”
    “That all he says?”
    “That’s enough.”
    Walter’s face was pale white and his lips were shaded blue. He had the arthritis bad and a twitchy airway. His respiration was slow and irregular. He quietly gasped when he breathed and conversation was difficult for him. Always about him was the smell of mentholatum.
    “Chores done?”
    “Yessir,” Henry said.
    “Come in for coffee?” Walter said.
    “No thanks.”
    “I was going to have some for myself and I am asking you if you’d like some.”
    Henry followed Walter inside to the tack room where he’d cut a door into the adjacent stall and fashioned a two-room apartment. He had a hot plate, kerosene heater, an icebox, and he’d installed a Murphy bed. He walked painfully, each step a decision. During the early days of the first war his unit was bombed and his knee shattered and he’d been shot in the eye. There were pink scars on his cheeks and he had medals he kept in a cigar box. The one eye was now glass and his good eye turned inward toward his nose.
    “What’s for dinner?” Henry said.
    “Oh, I’ll stodge up something,” Walter said.
    The windows were open, but the damp shut out the air and the